How We’ll Know When We’ve Won

“Are we winning?” That’s a query I hear almost every time I speak to an audience about liberty and the battle of ideas. Everyone wants to know if we should be upbeat or distraught about the course of events, as if the verdict should determine whether or not we continue the fight. Too many friends of liberty rely on the prevailing wind to tell them whether, when, and how to proceed–and even how to feel about it at any given moment.

Personally, I take a long-term, optimistic, even-tempered, and self-directed approach that doesn’t depend upon the rest of the world. Each of us ought to do all we can to advance the cause and then let the proverbial chips fall where they may, taking comfort in the fact that we did our best as individuals, regardless of the outcome. Moreover, I remain supremely confident that, as FEE’s Leonard Read put it, “truth will out” and liberty will indeed triumph because it is right. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling opiate anyway, so I never let it enter my mind.

But this begs an even more important question, one posed to me recently when I cited powerful intellectual trends as evidence that we are indeed winning. The question was, “How will we know when we’ve won?”

In the largest sense, “winning” means achieving a civil society in which people both preach and practice respect for life and property. It means we each mend our own ways and mind our own business. It means we rely upon voluntary association and individual compassion, not coercive arrangements and political redistribution. It means minimal government and maximum self-reliance. And when we get there, the battle of ideas will still not be over because people, being less than perfect, can always unlearn the truths they’ve learned.

In a narrower, more concrete sense, we’ll know we’ve won when very specific changes–in thought and policy–have come about. I’ve compiled a few here in a list that is by no means complete. Consider it nothing more than a beginning.

We’ll know we’ve won:

When “liberalism” once again is synonymous with liberty.

In his History of Economic Thought, Joseph Schumpeter noted that liberalism initially described the view of those who believed that “the best way of promoting economic development and general welfare is to remove fetters from the private enterprise economy and to leave it alone.” In today’s American parlance, it means quite the opposite. Schumpeter regarded it as “a supreme, if unintended, compliment” that “the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.”

Liberalism is too good a term to allow it to be the booty of statists. Let’s retake it, and let those who fight to preserve the failed big government status quo be known as the real “conservatives.” When that happens, we’ll have won much more than just the semantic high ground.

When “public service” is regarded as what one naturally does in the private sector.

Government employment, even when the employee is running roughshod over the rights and property of others, wears the prestigious mantle of selfless service to humanity, a cut above what motivates people who don’t work for the government. But in many cases, a government worker’s genuine public service actually begins when he secures an honest living in the private sector–producing goods and providing services that improve the lives of others who patronize him because they choose to, not because they’re forced to.

Conquering diseases, inventing labor-saving devices, feeding and clothing millions, and countless other private, often profit-motivated activities are no less indicative of service to the public than just about anything the government does. The next time someone tells you he’s running for office or seeking a government job, ask him if this means he is planning to leave public service.

When an “entitlement” is a paycheck, not a welfare check.

My hat’s off to whoever started the bad habit of calling government handouts “entitlements.” The term cleverly solidifies and perpetuates the very programs it labels–programs that take something of value from those who earned it and bestow it on those who didn’t earn it and may even value it less.

A paycheck for work performed is a genuine entitlement. A claim against that paycheck by those who would rather vote for a living than work for one is neither genuine nor something to which one is entitled in a free society. Let’s correct the thought patterns that allow the current misuse of the term to undergird the modern welfare state.

When citizens muster at least as much interest in a spending revolt as they often exhibit for a tax revolt.

Almost everyone favors lower taxes, at least for himself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone also favors less government spending. Sometimes, the same people who advocate lower taxes are in line for whatever they can slurp from the public trough.

It’s not enough to ask your congressman not to take from you. You must also demand that he not give you anything either, at least nothing that isn’t rightfully yours in the first place.

When government stops distributing its coercive powers to special interests.

Government isn’t the only outfit that employs legal and often unwarranted force against people. Others do it, too, if government first grants them the power.

The best example is today’s labor unions. With special privileges given them by government, they force millions into their ranks or into financially supporting causes to which they may object. For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in its 1988 Beck decision the right of each and every worker not to be assessed a penny by his union for political activities without his consent, but almost no one at any level of government seems interested in enforcing that ruling.

We should work for the day when a citizen’s Beck rights are widely regarded to be as important as his Miranda rights.

When self-improvement is understood to be the indispensable first step to reforming the world.

If every person set about to make himself a model citizen, he would have a full-time, lifetime job on his hands. Many succumb, however, to the temptation to meddle in the affairs of others–and even the best of intentions often end up yielding conflict and harm.

The steady progress of mankind derives from the progress of individual men and women who, one at a time, decide to make the best of what God gives them. Be a model, not a burden, and watch how quickly you encourage others to be the same.

A pretty tall order, you say? Yes, it is, and there are plenty of other benchmarks I could have added to this list to make the order even taller. Few things that are worthwhile are attained or retained easily. Winning the battle for liberty is among the most animating contests I can imagine, in part because the benchmarks along the way are as right as is the ultimate objective.

ABOUT

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Prior to becoming FEE’s president, he served for 20 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

THE FREEMAN

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CURRENT ISSUE

December 2014

Unfortunately, educating people about phenomena that are counterintuitive, not-so-easy to remember, and suggest our individual lack of human control (for starters) can seem like an uphill battle in the war of ideas. So we sally forth into a kind of wilderness, an economic fairyland. We are myth busters in a world where people crave myths more than reality. Why do they so readily embrace untruth? Primarily because the immediate costs of doing so are so low and the psychic benefits are so high.